The Lossless Audio Blog (The L.A.B)

Lossless Audio
loss·less au·di·o
Pronunciation: 'los-l&s au·di·o
Function: adjective
1. occurring or functioning without loss 2. A term describing a data compression algorithm which
retains all the information in the data, allowing it to be recovered perfectly by decompression.

10.05.2006

We Have Moved!

The Lossless Audio Blog has moved! We are up and running on the new site and getting used to the new setup.This site will stay up to direct users but we will not add any new content to it. All new posts will be on the new site. See you at the new site!www.losslessaudioblog.com

10.02.2006

1 Year Anniversary

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of The Lossless Audio Blog. It was 1 year ago today that we made our first post announcing the release of FLAC 1.1.2.

In and effort to improve the blog for the new year I started looking into adding some new features, but when looking into these changes all signs pointed back to the same place and that place was somewhere other than Blogger. To be able to add some of these much needed features we will be moving to WordPress with a new site located at www.losslessaudioblog.com.

Thanks for sending in your suggestions, for letting me know when a bad post was a really bad post and for returning to support this site!

9.23.2006

Philadelphia Orchestra Adds Flac Format

Late this week The Philidelphia Orchestra launched a new online music store to allow fans to download a variety of concerts including historic concerts from as early as the 1960's to current 2006 events. Sometime in the near future they will begin to make each new concert available for download within days of the concert.

What is so exciting about this is that it is another instance of an online music store providing a choice, the choice between lossy and lossless formats, MP3 and FLAC. They also have a small blurb describing the difference between the two formats (very cool idea!) which will help those new to having a choice make a more educated decision. Pricing is fairly reasonable ranging from $4.99 for some MP3 recordings to $11.99 for the longer FLAC concerts.

*For a limited time they are providing The Philadelphia Orchestra: Beethoven - Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 in MP3 for free! Download

9.21.2006

Lossless Audio Editor for MAC OS X

Rogue Amoeba has a new audio editor avalaible that is geared towards the lossless editing of audio files. This new project called Fission allows you to trim, split and edit your MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless, AIFF, etc. audio files with zero loss in quality. All of this is accomplished with an easy to use interface that allows you to quickly start editing.

9.19.2006

iAudio's F2, Flash Based FLAC Player

iAudio has a new flashed based player on the rise, the small palm-sized F2. Below is a photograph next to a credit card to give you an idea of how small the F2 really is. And as to be expected with an iAudio product this new DAP has alot of features including support for firmware upgrades and support for a wide range of formats like MP3, OGG, WMA, ASF, FLAC, WAV. The F2 will be available available in 512/1G/2G models.

9.17.2006

PMP/NES Emulator w/ FLAC Support

The Chinese manufacturer Odna is set to realase a new PMP with NES emulation capibilites. What grabbed our attention is the audio formats it supports which include MP3, OGG, FLAC, and WAV. For its PMP capabilities AVI, MPEG4 SP, XviD, and DivX videos are supported as well as JPG, BMP, and GIF for photo viewing. Other notable features include a FM radio, voice recorder and text viewer along with a 10 hour lithium battery. The VX737 is powered by a Freescale MC9328MXL processor and Philips UDA1380TT audio decoder. Asian manufacturers really seem to be pumping out devices with FLAC/OGG support but considering the amount of DAP's from ASIA the overall percentage is small.

9.16.2006

New version of XiphQT (Flac in iTunes)

A new version of XiphQT (Xiph QuickTime Components) is available which brings the version up to 0.1.5. XiphQT is a plugin that enables MAC and Windows users to play Xiph formats in Quicktime applications. This translates into interesting scenarios like Flac in iTunes! We love stuff like this!